The Review-A-Thon was so much fun last year that I’m coming back for more!
The usual disclaimers apply: I won’t get around to every game, and some reviews will be more in-depth than others. But the goal is to have a good time, and a good time shall be had!
I’ll fill in the index of reviews as I go along. Enjoy the ride.
Method in My Madness
take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die
First up: Method in My Madness by Max Fog (@SomeOne2 )
What is it?
Method in My Madness is a Twine game written for the 2024 Neo-Twiny Jam as well as the 2024 REALLY BAD IF Jam. Games in the Neo-Twiny Jam must be 500 words or less, and games in the REALLY BAD IF Jam had to be, well, bad. MMM tells the story of a woman obsessed with her neighbor through her disjointed internal thoughts, which are represented by lines of text scattered and jumbled throughout each page. (I don’t think there’s a single HTML formatting option left out!)
What I Liked
I’m going to level with you: I don’t think this is “REALLY BAD”. I think this is actually pretty good! In fact, I’m going to say something I’ve never said before…
…I liked the timed text.
No, but really! I think the timed text and the chaotic formatting have allowed the author, by deliberately throwing all the rules out the window, to find an application where they actually work well. Usually timed text is used to try and create tension by an author who doesn’t trust their work, doesn’t trust the reader, or both, but here it IS the work. MMM portrays a narrator who is desperate, chaotic, and unsure of herself in 500 words or less – no small task – and the various formatting choices do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting it across.
Suggestions
Of course, chaotic formatting and timed text is a give and take with the reader, and this did require some patience to see through to the end. Given its aforementioned inclusion into the REALLY BAD IF Jam a lot of this was probably deliberate! But since picking through authorial intent is generally a fool’s errand I’m going to list out the changes I would make to turn this into a “REALLY GOOD” piece of IF.
Overall Thoughts
Rules are made to be broken, and I think this game is a fantastic example of why. Don’t use timed text in your games – unless it’s as thoughtful and deliberate as in MMM. Good job Max, and thanks for starting my R-A-T race off with a bang!
Thanks!!! I’m glad the game was enjoyable for you - (secret: I didn’t consider entering it into RBIFJ until after i released it, thinking it was low quality 
which kind of ended up positive). I’m so glad you liked the timed text! That’s incredibly kind and also surprising to hear lol.
I might make an update soon to implement some of these things, since I do want it to not feel like a chore or too much of a struggle.
take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die by Naarel (@Naarel)
I’m picking what games to play entirely off vibes here, not using a randomizer, but that doesn’t make my R-A-T experience immune to strange coincidences. Right on the tails of Method in My Madness I’ve picked another heavily styled kinetic experience about being obsessed with someone from afar.
Our anonymous narrator is obsessed with a girl named Elizabeth Flanagan, who has recently drowned in Lake Dioscuri. The first part of the game is set up to make you think that, jealous of perfect Elizabeth and her perfect girlfriend and perfect life, they drowned her - but (as the mythologically minded may have caught) their relationship is more complicated than that.
The Dioscuri is the collective term for the twin Greek gods Castor and Pollux – technically half-twins, as they share the same (mortal) mother but have different fathers (traditionally one mortal and one divine). They were the patron gods of sailors, with the power to rescue them from storms, and also associated with death and immortality. When Castor (the mortal twin) was mortally wounded, Pollux (the divine twin) gave up half his immortality to save him, leaving them both as half-divine and half-alive. (They were also really good at horseback riding, but I don’t think that’s thematically relevant here.)
All of this is resonant because it turns out that the narrator and Elizabeth are the same person, or at least parts of the same person. The narrator’s complicated relationship with Elizabeth is actually her complicated relationship with herself and with how the world sees her. The perfect and divine Elizabeth Flanagan that others see is constricting and artificial to the real, messy, decidedly mortal Elizabeth, and has created a relationship where everyone expects, everyone takes, but nobody gives or understands. Overwhelmed with the pressure, she throws herself (or at least the “divine” part of herself) into the waters of the lake, leaving the narrator as the mortal and real part of herself behind. The waters rescue her from herself, or at least that was the goal.
It’s unclear here (purposely) what the actual, literal outcome is here for Elizabeth and the unnamed narrator. (Is one or both of them a ghost? Did anyone actually die? How separate are they now?) But this is all in service of the metaphor and the message about growing up and being the person you want to be, and not the person the world wants you to be. Sometimes those two are radically different. If one is lucky you can grow from one to another, like coloring in someone else’s drawing on your own terms, but sometimes that’s not an option. Sometimes the person you are is so different from the person others want you to be that you have no choice but to take a chance and burst out of the cocoon, unrecognizable to those around you. Sometimes it feels like a death.
I can confirm, having been a closeted and obnoxiously overachieving teenage girl once upon a time – yeah, it’s like that.
Playing these two games back to back has also clarified some things for me about how I feel about kinetic experiences, and in particular what about them I’m looking for. I like kinetic VNs (which are full of art and voice acting to make up for the lack of interactivity), but I’ve struggled with some pieces of kinetic text IF where your only interaction is to click “next” to continue to the next chunk of text. What makes a kinetic game feel good (to me) and why? The answer seems to lie in what exactly the game is doing to take advantage of the medium. With more traditional IF the answer to that is “interactivity”, but with kinetic games I think the answer is “deliberate styling”.
take me to the lakes… is a visual novel in the sense that it has graphics and sound effects, but those are fairly minimal (as expected, given the author made it in 36 hours!!! I am impressed). The important thing about them is that they’re used to great effect. The sound effects and striking black-and-white styling add texture to the experience from the moment you start playing, and
the placement of text and choice of font on every slide is deliberate as to the feelings it wants to evoke in the player. There’s no timed text here but the text is doled out in small chunks with “click to continues” after each one, which helps add friction and deliberateness to a narrative that needs the player to slow down and consider what’s happening. (This is, I suspect, the effect that many authors playing around with timed text are actually going for so I’m taking notes.)
I’ve deviated from my typical review format here (as I do sometimes) because I don’t feel it appropriately fits this game. Some games are better suited to a ramble instead of a more structured review, I think? Anyway, to sum up my thoughts on take me to the lakes… now that I’ve written a review that is I’m pretty sure longer than the game itself:
WOW!
(Also, how did you do this in 36 hours?!)
Hi hi! Thank you so much for the review, I’m really glad you enjoyed …the lakes…. I’ve got no comments other than just adding some context for some things because why not, I guess.
This is because of how Decker works and how I work with Decker. The default Decker color palette is 16 bit and I used all of the available grays, whites, and blacks from it (in addition to the animated “color” and that one “glitch” bit which used red, green, and blue). Every drawing was made with my own index finger on my own (touchscreen) laptop screen, which made most of my moves a little imprecise – also, I’m not really a visual artist, so there’s that. The minimalism of sound effects comes from Decker’s heavy compression put on sound, in addition to the limitation of 10 seconds maximum for a sound clip. Limitations are really fun, though, and I love to work with them.
It wasn’t actually 36 hours. Velox Formido 2 didn’t give the theme until 9 hours into the jam and I didn’t start working until 8 hours into the jam. Minus all the time I spent on sleeping and such, it was closer to 20. The secret is being well-rested… and maybe reusing scenes. Oh well.
Once again, thank you a lot for your review and hope the rest of your R-A-T Race goes well!